


An Inch Too Much

by AgapantoBlu



Series: Blood's thickness [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Domestic Violence, Episode 9 Related, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, It's only for a moment in a flashback and not in much details but better safe than sorry, M/M, Non-Consensual Haircuts, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Child Abuse, Viktor's POV Kind of, supportive parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 02:59:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8732206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: He remembers he had always done his haircuts on his own, from then on; always kept it short, shorter, so that they couldn’t become an handle, a leash to pull him on his knees.
    
    
    So yes, it’s just an inch, but it’s still enough for his father to grab him again.
    
  
An unwanted flashback of his past was the last thing Viktor needed before Yuuri's Rostelecom Cup and in between that, the pressure of being back in Russia and Makkachin suddenly hurting, he feels crushed.He doesn't want to go back to how it used to be.***[Kind of Viktor's POV of Episode 9 - Past Child Abuse and Homophobia]





	

 

**_An Inch Too Much_ **

 

_It’s just an inch._

He repeats it as he forces his lips in a subtle bent, a smile barely sketched so that it won’t look strained; and as he wears the sunglasses and _it’s night, Viktor._ As he puts his jacket on, as he pays for his coffee, as he smiles to journalists he just wants to insult; as he points to Yurio, as he dines with Yuuri, as they go back to their room.

_It’s just an inch._

“Viktor?”

He turns, and the smile on his lips is real this time. Yuuri stares at him from his hiding behind the glasses, a light pink blush on the cheeks and neck, as he plays with his jacket’s zip to disguise the way his eyes dart to the double-sized bed to their left. After the kiss at the Cup of China, sharing a room in the hotel hosting them for the Rostelecom Cup should have been nothing, especially with their resolution not to hide in front of the local laws, but Yuuri liked to overthink and lose himself in long mental trips where he messed something up and Viktor ended up leaving.

 _“As if I could, Yuuri,”_ Viktor had answered him the first time, leaving a gentle kiss on his temple that drew their taxi driver’s eyes on them for a second. _“You still need to pay me my coaching fees, don’t you?”_ Yuuri punched him on the chest then, but had laughed, reassured by the way their hands had entwined and by the tickle of rebellious grey hair against his cheek.

Now, Viktor bends forward and steals a kiss, smiling just a bit mischievously when Yuuri’s mouth chases after his as soon as he tries to pull back. “You have a competition, tomorrow,” he reminds, but his voice is low, tempting, and Yuuri surrenders with a half grunt half whimper, without even attempting a resistance.

“You’re terrible,” he complains while Viktor leans forward, encircles his waist with his arms and buries the face in a side of his neck, aiming straight for the jugular to bite it lightly, a playful predator. “That’s not how a responsible coach behaves.”

By now, Viktor has seen enough to know that Yuuri is all but the innocent lamb he resembles with his messy hair and big glasses on his nose, so he just slips the latters off and lays them on the beside table before carting his hands through black locks to move them backward, freeing the forehead.

Yuuri’s brown eyes look at him with a mix of curiosity and teasing now. Viktor could swear those glasses are, as Yurio would say, a good eighty percent of Yuuri’s self control. Without them, the skater doesn’t hesitate pushing with his waist against his, sending him backward a couple of step and making him fall sitting on the bed.

“When have I ever been responsible?” Viktor strives to say, a smile on his lips that threatens to give way to an obscene expression in the very moment Yuuri grabs his shoulder to send him laying on his back.

He fakes indifference while pulling himself higher so that half his legs won’t be left out of the mattress, but the mask grew heavier as the other’s body appears above him on hands and knees, a gentle cage of flesh secluded into a stupid tracksuit that Viktor projects to burn, together with a certain necktie. To be honest, he has an whole list of clothes of Yuuri he wants — _should_ — get rid of and he repeats it in his mind not to start moaning shamefully from the mere feeling of the skater’s mouth on his chest, meekly chasing after the fingers prying his shirt’s buttons open.

“Indeed,” Yuuri blows against his stomach, and Viktor struggles to remember what they are talking about. “You should take better care of your skater,—” A tongue plays with his bellybutton before going lower. His belt and the zip of his trousers tinkle when these are pulled down, with little to no regard about the brand on their tag, “— _pay him more attention._ ”

Viktor laughs, despite the face brushing against his boxers, but it’s a rich and fond laughter, with a deep note of lust and excitement right at the end. “Even more?,” he asks, a hand grabbing the sheets and the other slipping down, through black strands that are definitely not his. “Don’t I pay you enough of that already?”

Yuuri straightens up almost suddenly. In a moment his forehead presses against the other’s and his eyes are Viktor’s whole world. The gesture is familiar and makes the Russian man smile. “No,—” he says, “—I want it all. I want you to look _only at me_.”

Viktor moans this time. A bit for the words and a bit for the hand lowering his boxers right now. The other hasn’t even bothered undressing him completely, he still has his trousers and now his underwear around his ankles, but it doesn’t look like the brunet has any intention of allowing him to finish taking his clothes off. On his part, Yuuri is still completely dressed and the mere thought of how they must look like, he completely undone and with an erection growing under the hands of his skater who looks just as cold as the ice he competes on, makes him blush and harden even more.

A shiver of pleasure starts from his brain to run down to his groin and it makes his back arch. The mixture of shame and lust is something he had never dared to try before meeting Yuuri, but the man now delivers it to him without hesitation, leading him around with the firm hand of Eros and all the love of On Ice.

Yuuri knows him and dives on his mouth, biting the soft wet lips with a bit of force too much, just enough to make Viktor’s toes curl, to make him jerk for a second. The coach’s body is perfect under his spread legs and when in his movement he presses his stomach against the other’s groin, the brunet _has_ to pull back.

Viktor’s eyes shine with the knowledge of the power he still, even in this situation, even with the prearranged roles for the scene, even within their game, has over the other.

With a tiny bit of huff and and a bit of exasperation, Yuuri abandons his erection, eliciting a protesting whine, and instead brings his hand already sticky with pre-orgasm fluids to Viktor’s fringe.

He pulls the locks with not much strength, just enough to lift the other’s face, but the smile vanishes immediately from the man’s face.

_It’s just an inch!_

Viktor screams “No”.

 

***

 

_He remembers the pain in his skin like thousands needles pressing in his head, like thunders attacking his brain._

_Remembers the pain to his hands as his nails breaking against callouses knuckles, a jacket of heavy leather, a wall of refusal; as the blood dripping down his fingers and making them slippery and unable to hold onto anything but the edge of the kitchen table as he gets pushed down_ , low, low, lower, _on his knees on the floor._

 _Remembers pain to his chest as the mad fear of the light reflexion on the scissors, of his father’s booming voice yelling at him_ come here come here come here immediately I said obey me! _and as the dry smell of vodka mixed with the breath of a normal worked who decided to stop for a drink with his colleagues before going back home._

_Remembers betrayal as his mother’s eyes not looking at him, but at the stairs leading to the first floor, there where his brother is sleeping, he who instead is the family hope, who’s studying law at University, who’ll become a brilliant lawyer, who doesn’t waste his time with stupid skates winning stupid awards on world level that only make his father’s rage grow._

_Remembers shame and guilt not as the silver strands falling all around him, shards of an halo painted on the dark floor of his house, and not as Yakov’s expression the following day when the man had seen him arriving to the rink with short hair,_ a new look did you see? I’m too old for an androgynous persona anyway; _but he remembers them as chocked sobs in throat instead, as the tongue stuck through his teeth as to not wake his brother up and as the stiffened neck in an attempt not to make a wrong move and get himself disfigured. He remembers them as his own inertia as he silently cried and let his hair get cut by his drunk father._

 _The man hadn’t even bothered with finishing his work, or maybe he didn’t have enough coordination to do that, so after a while, when he was finally sure his son had_ learnt his lesson this time _, he had simply thrown the scissors on the floor, leaving Viktor with a devastated head, random long locks and whole portions of skin perfectly visible, curled up on the floor like a kicked dog._

_“Make it that I’ll never see you try to kiss a boy again, Viktor,—” he had hissed, poisonous and almost scarier than in his most exaggerated and violent anger, “—or may God have mercy on you because I’ll kill you with my own hands.”_

_He doesn’t remember the name nor the face of the boy who had accompanied him home after that night practice. After his father, coming home at the worst time possible, had seen them and dragged Viktor inside, the guy had found a new coach, somewhere else in the country, and had left Yakov, Saint Petersburg and the boy he said “I like you” to not even longer than a day earlier._

_Viktor remembers everything else, though, and he remembers how short his hair was an year later, when he had closed his luggage for the last time and left that house as an eighteen years old man, tired and with a letter from his brother, that same brother who was now studying_ art _in Cambridge, within his bag._ Leave, Vitya. Do it as soon as you can.

 _He remembers he had always done his haircuts on his own, from then on; always kept it short,_ shorter _, so that they couldn’t become an handle, a leash to pull him on his knees._

_So yes, it’s just an inch, but it’s still enough for his father to grab him again._

 

_***_

 

Viktor comes slowly back to the present, and only after overwriting that vicious memory with the one of the day he had left. He can still hear the sound of the door closing behind him, not a word from his mother and a muffled “good grief” from his father that accompanies him in the cold air of a Christmas he celebrated escaping his cage, accepting the snow soaking him all the way to the flat his brother had lent for him.

Some days, Viktor hates Alexander. He hates him as loudly as he would have wanted to scream against his door every time the other closed it not to hear, not to see, to pretende nothing was happening in the living room. He hates him of a black and corroding hatred, powerful and unforgiving.

Some days, Viktor stares at his own cellphone as if by that his brother’s new phone number could appear out of thin air. He wants to call him and talk to him and listen to him muttering in Russian with his words too big and important for a casual conversation, to say he’s sorry for thinking he had been abandoned. He wants to give him back the money for the flat and tell him he’s thinking about leaving it and moving in Japan. He wants him to meet Yuuri.

_Yuuri._

Only when he tries to call his name, Viktor realizes he’s panting, his _long long long_ hair are stuck to his forehead with sweat and his face his buried into something dark, soft and warm. If he closes his eyes, he can feel an heartbeat against his own cheek.

“ _Vitya_?”

Viktor lets out the breath that has been holding onto his throat and his shoulders relax, leaving behind only the fastidious rigidity of his muscles. He doesn’t care. Staying like this, curled on a side against Yuuri’s chest to listen to him repeating that nickname in clumsy Russian with an heavy accent, makes him feel well. If it were for him, he wouldn’t leave that bed ever again. 

“ _Vitya_? Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying? Viktor?”

He sighs, heavily, but brushes his nose against the other’s chest and whines a confirmation. “Yuuri…” He doesn’t really remember what he wanted to say; his voice is so raw and it breaks through his teeth in those few syllabi he attempts to say, and he gets distracted listening to it without ending his sentence.

Yuuri sighs too, but it’s more of a relieved gesture. His breath ruffles some strands on Viktor’s nape, there where his hair are growing thin — and he _knows it_ , for as much as Yuuri denies —, and after a short while a hand raises to smoother them back in their place. The caress keeps on for a bit before the fingers stop on the back of the head, holding him like a baby.

“I’m fine.” Viktor knows he’s lying because old feelings are getting tangled in his chest, but he does it anyway, even knowing Yuuri will immediately find out, even knowing that sometimes some spasm is still making him tremble. Maybe he’s a compulsive liar, by now.

“ _Vitya._ ” Yuuri’s voice is the one of a parent one step from the scolding, last warning, and if he thinks that until the previous year this little Katsudon was worshipping him and now is treating him like a capricious child, Viktor can’t stop himself from laughing a bit. Even his laughter his acute and unsure, and the grip of the arm around his waist tightens some more. “I’m here.”

Viktor pulls away from the hug to lay his head on the pillow instead, he wonders for a moment how Yuuri had managed to turn him on the mattress and fix the clothes he can feel more or less covering him, and finally he looks into the other’s eyes. Brown, warm, always lucid and engulfing, be it a day of shyness or of confidence; completely different from the pale blue full of rage Viktor remembers from his adolescence, that same blue he can see in the mirror every day.

Yuuri is frowning and studying his as if there were a riddle written on his forehead. He’s biting his lower lip to hold back something that’s on the tip of his tongue, that he wants to say but is _not sure_ he can, and he doesn’t make a show of even trying to stop touching Viktor in any way, but instead he moves his head so that it rests on his nape and moves the other on his side. He doesn’t try to pull away, but neither to prevaricate the little distance the other has put in between them.

“I’m here,” he repeats and Viktor nods.

This is one of those days in which he hates his brother, because he’s not here, he’s never been, not when it really mattered. Yuuri is and that’s another story, it’s an whole different life completely.

“I want to cut my hair,” he says. Soon he’ll tell his lover what happened, probably when he’ll feel better, or maybe as soon as that inch too much will have disappeared. For now he only reveals that and apparently it’s enough.

“The only barber in Hasetsu is a bit far from the onsen, so I always get my hair cut by my mother or sister,” Yuuri admits, blushing as if he was embarrassed in the name of his hometown. He’s adorable. “You don’t have to let them cut your hair if you don’t want, obviously! It’s not a problem to go to a shop here, absolutely, I didn’t mean that! Oh my, that’s so embarrassing, I must sound like a kid, ahhhh…”

Yuuri will never change _too much_ , Viktor has accepted it. He can become Eros when he wants, but a part of him will always stay the same unsure guy, a bit clumsy. It’s part of him charm, though, so it’s all right.

He takes a moment to picture Hiroko, Yuuri’s mother, coming close to him with scissors in her hand. The smile on her face is the only way he can remember her has, at most with a surprised expression, and even if he wanted he can’t imagine her with his father’s wrath. If he tries, all that comes to his mind is the day Yuuri announced he was in love with him on world-broadcasted TV and she had laid a cheek on her hand and started smiling alone, before standing to go make some tea singing to herself.

“If it’s not too much trouble for your mother, she would do me a favor if she could cut them for me when we go back home.” A huge favor. He doesn’t say it, but Yuuri has just seen him getting a panic attack in the middle of their bed so he has probably already understood that it’s not easy for him to let someone do something like that. He used to have Yakov doing it, he trusted him, but he’s not sure he can do it now that they’re rivals; nor he’s sure he wants to.

Yakov doesn’t live in Japan and he can’t always fly to Russia to get an haircut. It’s time to find another solution.

Yuuri bends forward to kiss the corner of his mouth, not the cheek and not the lips, there in between the lover and the friend, where he stands as a pillar promising unconditioned support, without questions. When he pulls back, he takes the hands off his body to turn and retrieve his glasses from the nightstand. Viktor watches him wearing them and going back to his most tepid version, gentle more than sensual, before turning again toward him.

“You’re sure you want to wait that long?” he asks, searching for signs that betray a lie. “We’ll be here for three days more at least…”

“It’s all right,” Viktor shakes his head, but smiles a bit now. He breaths slowly, his heartbeat is a muffled sound in his chest, and when he moves a bit he lets the poorly matched-up buttons expose a part of the skin on his chest. “I can resist three days, Yuuri.”

Yuuri looks at him clearly unconvinced, and because of this Viktor rises on a arm to kiss his mouth. Full lover and nothing friend, as always. He doesn’t like to move aside, to give up on things. What he wants, Viktor takes; and now he doesn’t want a barber, now he wants Yuuri, completely and totally, in the most humiliating and erasing way that exists. He wants to disappear in front of the other, under his hands, and he wants to come back just for his lover.

He also wants an orgasm, because his erection may have disappeared in his panic, but the feeling of frustration in his mind now comes back at the sight of Yuuri’s open jacket.

His lover makes a sound that resembles an exasperated huff against his tongue when he brushes against him languidly, but he returns the gesture. Only when Viktor tries to lay on his back again, Yuuri pulls back a bit.

“What made you snap?” he asks, frowning. He runs a hand on Viktor’s chest, opening the shirt again, but he makes no gesture to get back on  him. “I don’t want to see you like that again. Was it just the hair? Something more?”

“Just the hair.” Viktor crosses his hands behind Yuuri’s neck and he uses them to pull the other above him, still on all four, just to wrap his legs around that waist. He feels a bit like a sloth or a panda, like this, but Yuuri laughs and shakes his head, so it’s okay. “It’s not a problem if you touch them, just don’t… don’t pull them, all right?”

“When I did it on the rink…” Yuuri hesitates, bites his lip. “When I touched your hair on the rink in Hasetsu and then Beijing, did it bother you? Honestly.”

“No,—” Viktor throws a hand on his own face, the back of it against his forehead in a dramatic gesture, “—the only wound you opened was on my pride, Yuuri. The passing of time is wearing me out!”

“Idiot.” Yes, Viktor is an idiot, that must be why Yuuri kisses him, to shut him up. He doesn’t mind, not as long as the other struggles using his own tongue because he keeps laughing.

Being with Yuuri is so natural it renders unthinkable all the things his father used to yell at him.

Viktor struggles with forgetting his father every time he comes back to his mind. He doesn’t have flashbacks often, but he trained to recover far when they happen, to pretend they didn’t soak him to the bones like the cold winter wind. He can’t stop himself from having his family in his mind for days after a relapse, but he has learnt how to push the memories to a side, to focus only a corner of his mind on them and go on with the rest, to ignore the comparisons that seem natural and the images that come uninvited. He’s grown good at it.

Yuuri’s mouth on his crotch, the trousers still open from earlier, is a great distraction. It’s not the first time Viktor uses sex to erase the memories of his past, but it _is_ the first time he really cares about the person he’s with, the first time he feels like there’s something more than the simple _use_ with ulterior motives. Orgasms and void are companions he had chased after often; love is a new thing for him too, and thus it’s shiny and fascinating.

He brings his hands to Yuuri’s head to make him look up a bit and he smiles when their eyes meet.

Chestnut erases blue, warmth wipes the cold away and pleasure locks again the door to his past, at least for a bit.

 

***

 

Viktor still thinks about his father, often, the next day.

As he kneels to tie Yuuri’s skates and feels his serious, scrutinizing gaze on him and he has to smile because otherwise who knows who he’ll perform. When he gets pulled by his necktie, but his lover’s voice is so sensual and filled of promises that there’s no competition for the incoherent screams in his mind. Yuuri swears to show their love to the whole Russia _and he does it_ , he doesn’t tell him to hide, and Viktor knows he won’t run away to the other side of the world in a day pretending nothing happened between them. Yuuri is so _childish and possessive_ , when it comes to him: under the eyes of the judges, he sends him a kiss from the centre of the rink, in front of all the cameras, and if people are shocked he just seems to gloat. He shouts to the world _Viktor is mine_ without a crumble of shame, and that way he also erases all his lover’s doubts.

He wish he could not, but Viktor thinks about his father even as he kneels to kiss Yuuri’s skate after the performance. He thinks about when he had gone on his knees because he had been forced, when he had no choice, and thinks about the screams and _I won’t let my son become a slut kneeling in front of whoever’s cock as long as it’s big_ , but the comparison disappears when he hears Yuuri yelling Yurio’s name. He lets himself being dragged by the enthusiasm and the desire to see his other ‘student’ doing well pushes him to put aside even the memory of those words.

Makkachin wipes everything away, but in the worst way possible.

 

***

 

Viktor trusts Yakov and trusts Yuuri. He doesn’t trust himself, of being able to keep serious and professional and lucid, if he were to lose his dog.

Makkachin had been a gift from his brother, before he left to go to England. His father never liked him, but that was probably because the dog wasn’t like Alexander or his mother and when someone came close to Viktor he gritted his teeth and growled and barked and _he wouldn’t allow it_. Viktor had never been touched again, not even with a fingertip, since the moment Makkachin came into his life; he loved that pet more than anyone in his family, in his whole world with the exception of Yuuri and by now Yurio too.

Yuuri doesn’t know anything, as always because Viktor doesn’t like to tell, but it’s as if he did anyway. The urgency with which he orders him to go back to Japan, _to leave him alone in Russia_ , is the same impressive strength of a tsunami. Yakov instead is the grumbling support of an old rock.

Viktor is more than a little worried about leaving those two together, unable to keep the idea that they could destroy each other out of his mind.

 

***

 

From the moment he lands, everything is confused. Arriving to the vet shop, discovering that as he was on the plane Makkachin’s treatment started working and now his friend’s fine, _he is fine Viktor_ , being brought back to Yu-topia by Mari and her explicative grunts, it’s all a flash happening around him almost without him being part of it.

He’s sitting within the onsen staring at Minako’s pc screen waiting for the hours until the exhibition to pass and feeling completely useless. He should be in Russia right now, with Yuuri, because that is his place and here he’s of no use to anyone: the feeling is so violent it crushes him. He didn’t sleep a minute on the plane, and he’s surely not sleeping now.

“Vicchan?” Viktor lifts his gaze slowly, barely registering the voice calling him, but Hiroko answers his lost expression with a kind smile. “Two days ago, Yuuri texted me you need to get your hair cut. Would you like me to do it while we wait for his turn?”

 _We_. Viktor shouldn’t be surprised that Hiroko wants to watch her son too, but for some reason he hadn’t been expecting it anyway. He forces himself not to show it. He wants to find a new solution after all, doesn’t he?

 _Be a man, for once, Viktor!_ He never wanted to find himself agreeing with his father.

“If it isn’t too much of a bother,” he says, striving into one of his worst interpretations of a charming smile, but Hiroko just pats a hand on his shoulder as she gets up, probably to fetch the scissors.

And then she drops a bomb Viktor wasn’t ready to catch. “You’re never a bother, Vicchan, you know that!” She smiles, as if she’d just said the most normal thing in the world. “And who knows, maybe it will bring Yuuri some luck! Like an offering for a good fate!”

Viktor is almost sure hair offerings is a thing women do, for brothers or husbands or whatever. In any case, it’s surely an intimate gesture and Hiroko attributes it to him without hesitation, with the naïve amusement of a girl chattering about her friend’s crush.

He runs a hand through silver strands almost without thinking, _too long too long too too too long_ , and he imagined what an offering it would be if they were still as he used to wear them at fifteen. He smiles not to cry.

“Maybe,” he concedes seeing Hiroko coming back, a pair of old metal scissors in her fingers. They shine for a moment, and they’re terrifying, but the woman brandishing them brings a hand to cover her lips and looks at him with amused eyes.

“Don’t tell Yuuri I told you, but he took it so bad when you cut your hair short the first time!” The woman kneels behind him and Viktor stiffens when her fingertips caress his neck collecting the locks to cut. She keeps on talking, not noticing the muscles tensing in his shoulders. “He was desperate! He said you looked so sad without your long hair. And ‘so big’! He kept on cutting off every article related to you anyway, but his favorites I think still are those with your old pictures. I was sad when he took them all off, the walls of his room were covered in them!”

This catches Viktor’s interest. The idea of a little Yuuri just as sad as him for that forced loss, cutting pictures from newspapers to hang them in his room, talking so much about him that his parents even after years remember of that obsession of his.

“Really?” he asks, faking indifference. He has a little smile growing on his lips despite the tiredness, all at the mere thought of Yuuri’s face when he’ll find out he had been make part of that little secret of his. 

“And I know I kept them all! But he doesn’t want to tell me where,” Hiroko sounds like a pouting kid as she speaks, and Viktor gets lost between the sound of her voice and the images broadcasted by the Rostelecom Cup website. Cuts from yesterday’s competition, Yuuri appearing every now and then — _often_ , very often, because he was great — just to tease him and make him feel even guiltier for not being by his side. “I wanted some of your pictures to frame them, now that you live here, but Yuuri flashes away every time I try to ask for them.”

For a moment, Viktor jerks, stopping himself halfway through the gesture of turning toward the woman, eyes widened and mouth gaping, when he remembers the scissors. Curious, he thinks, because for a moment he forgot about them.

He strives to stare at the images on the screen — a moment not much elegant but surely funny, of him and Yuuri cheering for Yurio before his turn — as he asks: “A picture of me?”

“Vicchan,—” Hiroko almost sings his name, in a way that’s a bit amazed and a bit exasperated, “—you’ve been living here for months already. You’re part of Yuuri’s family and thus of ours. You know I don’t really get much about skating and competitions, so I don’t know how long you’ll stay here, be it for training or for a personal choice. But for as long as you’ll want to stay, you know we’ll always have a room for you here.” Viktor catches her bending on his shoulder, to steal a look to his face. “Yuuri’s, for example, is big enough for two.”

Viktor laughs, a laughter that chocks in his throat out of tiredness and nerves but a laughter anyway. He pictures Yuuri’s face if he were to come back home and find his things in _their_ room and his shoulders drop a bit.

“And it would be so cute to place together the pictures of our two Vicchan!”

Viktor finds himself take away by Hiroko’s chatter. He finds out about Yuuri’s first dog, what happened to the last Grand Prix, _understands_ why the other insisted so much for him to go back home. He discovers how Yuuri at first wanted to do ballet and how Minako pushed him to try figure skating. He finds out he disappointed Yuuri far before they get to know each other for real, in that airport, and that makes him feel bad, but the woman behind him bursts out laughing telling him about her son’s reaction when he had appeared into their onsen and the scissors are on the table and he blinks.

“Done,” Hiroko says, her voice soft and gentle. Viktor has the feeling all those special stories, so important to him, haven’t been just naïvely thrown at him randomly.

The woman offers him a little mirror and leaves with the scissors and a mysterious smile. He watches her leave and thinks that maybe now he knows where Yuuri’s peculiar spirit came from. Makkachin whines against his thighs and Viktor lowers his gaze just to meet his own reflection.

The fringe on his face is a bit shorter than how he used to wear, but it suits him. The haircut is well done, with quite practicality, and that inch too much isn’t there anymore.

Viktor feels like he can finally breath again.

 

***

 

Yuuri ends up fourth. He made it to the Grand Prix, yes, but it’s easy to read the disappointment in his eyes in the post-competition records.

Viktor must hug him. The soonest possible.

So he waits for him at the airport and his father is in his mind, but in a different way. 

His father is beside Hiroko in his head and the choice is easy; Alexander pales in comparison to Mari; Yakov may be loyal but he can’t compete with Minako’s and Yuuko’s and the triplet’s enthusiasm; his empty flat doesn’t look like paradise anymore if place beside the warmth made of lively activity of Yu-topia.

The choice is so, _so_ , easy.

 

***

 

“ _Please, take care of me until I quit._ ”

Viktor was not expecting this. Viktor had things to tell Yuuri, many. He had to ask him where his pictures were, to tell him that he wanted one of them beside his dog’s; he wanted to tell him that the flat in Saint Petersburg could be sold because he wouldn’t have been able to go back there after seeing Hasetsu, and that Russia seemed too cold now; he wanted to tell him he wanted to train the triples in skating in their free time and that he _never_ again wanted to see him through a screen from afar, may he be celebrating or crying, in front of a defeat or victory, skating _or not_.

Instead he takes Yuuri’s hand, brings it to his mouth and kisses his ring finger. He hopes Yuuri understands, because sometimes his insecurities make him so blind it’s exhausting.

“ _It’s almost like a marriage proposal._ ” He says it without teasing, with calmness and a lot of hope, and when Yuuri hugs him he can’t hold back. “ _I wish you’d never retire._ ”

Yuuri’s tears wet his shoulder as they hold each others and this time, finally for sure, he knows the message came across.

Now, there’s not an inch between them.


End file.
